“His grievance is, however, more serious still. Because he has no grand passion for her, Madame turns round and asserts that there is no real marriage between them!--that, in short, if she cannot have the silver moon, she won’t be put off with very good cheese of the day. You follow me? She does not wish to be a wife to Raoul.”
“Oh,” cried Rose incredulously, “oh, Léon, surely Monsieur Gérard did not tell you this about his wife?”
“But yes--” said Léon calmly, “why not? I, however, consider that if Madame lacks management, Raoul lacks souplesse. Things should never have been allowed to reach such a sharpness. I don’t say he could have given her a grand passion, one can’t invent such things, but he might, all the same, have lent himself to the situation during the honeymoon. If a good woman cannot have a honeymoon, what can she have? The type will die out if they are to be starved all round.”
“Do you mean to say you want him to pretend?” Rose asked. She spoke quietly, but the feeling behind her words made Léon throw down the hat and catch her hands in his.
“Ah!” he said, “you Queen of the Puritans! No! not pretend--but he might--mightn’t he?--have for the moment have gone a trifle in advance of the facts?”
Rose withdrew her hand from his. “It seems to me,” she said, “all of it, simply horrible! I don’t understand. How could he come here and tell you such things--to talk about his wife and her feelings? Why, it’s all so incredibly private! It’s as dreadful as if he’d killed her. I don’t think I should have minded it half so much if he had. And what is the use of it, Léon--why did he come to you?”
“Ah, that is why I told you at all,” Léon explained, a little crestfallen. “Of course, I knew you would shrink from this affair. It is natural that you should, though I cannot, for my part, see why, in a strange land, surrounded by Italians, the poor Raoul shouldn’t be allowed to consult a compatriot and a friend. However, it is really for my assistance that he came, and I cannot give him that, Rose, without your consent. It is simply a question of whether or no you are sufficiently magnanimous.”
“How do you mean?” asked Rose, more frightened still. “You know I can’t talk French properly, and if I could I shouldn’t know what to say to people like that!”
“Oh, I didn’t ask you to mix yourself up in it,” Léon answered reassuringly. “It is, however, perhaps even harder for most women--what I have to ask of you! It is to stand aside and let me mix myself up in it.”
She shivered a little. “Oh, but why,” she asked, “should you be mixed up in it? We only saw them yesterday!”